PhoneTalk

We've seen glimpses of the new BlackBerry OS for a few months now and finally, today BlackBerry unveiled the BlackBerry Torch. The latest BlackBerry for AT&T will run RIM's new OS 6 and sports a design that we haven't seen from BlackBerry yet. The Torch will have a spacious 3.2-inch capacitive touch screen (that's just a smidge smaller than the one found on the BlackBerry Storm that slides up to reveal a full tactile QWERTY keyboard, much like the design of the Palm Pre. The cell phone has a sleeker looking design than the Storm, but measures just about as thick. It also has a 624Mhz processor (not as fast as the one found on the HTC EVO 4G, but still plenty fast), WiFi (support for 802.11n - more secure WiFi), 4GB of memory on board and will also come with a 4GB microSD card. Additionally, the cell phone has a 5-megapixel camera with flash and 2x digital zoom and the ability to record video. Did we mention it's also a world phone so you can use it in other spots around the globe.

The real story here is what the new OS 6 has to offer:

Universal Search: You can simply type on the home screen to find something. Universal search will scan folders, apps, Internet, email, and more.

Improved Web Browsing: The web experience is more like the one you find on your computer at home. The user experience is much improved over the web experience on current BlackBerry smartphones. It even offers tabbed browsing so you can have multiple web pages open simultaneously.

Social Media: In the new OS, all your social media feeds appear in one place via RSS feeds. When you type an update you can send it to a single social media account (Twitter, Facebook, etc), or to all your social media accounts.

Multimedia: There's now an integrated YouTube app. There's geotagging for photos so the cell phone will automatically add the location of where the photo was taken. Finally, the WiFi music sync lets you tag music not on the device for future syncing.

Finally, at the press conference it was announced that the BlackBerry Torch will be available with AT&T service on August 12th for $199 with a new contract.

Topics: In The Know AT&T Wireless BlackBerry Camera Smart phones International WiFi Video GPS